The cost of decency...

There is something fundamentally obscene about the lengths we're willing to go to protect those we hold in the highest regard. Eventually all human dynamics with absolute investment break down because we have become a society, a culture, a people that are incapable of trusting one another completely. Those of us that can trust, that can love, that can fight to overcome the obstacles we place in our own way to protect us from the maelstrom of interaction, we are invariably spit on, taken advantage of, and victimized, time and again by those that ask for more without ever being full. The stars that burn brightest are most often drained beyond salvation by the incessant vacuum of more selfish people. The girl that seeks solace and understanding but shies and runs away from connection or investment because of the complications it causes in her life with a boyfriend that evidently doesn’t bridge the gap completely, despite him probably being a perfectly wonderful man otherwise. A parent that requests, demands, manipulates and orchestrates the feelings and situations of others to get what they want and then stare stupefied at the sky, bewildered and lost by the idea that they might somehow actually be told “no”. The woman that uses, abuses, consumes, and obliterates everything good in another, and still seeks to be loved and adored despite the abhorrent behavior.

            It’s all so much excess, so much extraneous emotion and conviction, expelled for no reason other than the want to be decent, to be altruistic, to offer something more than what others have seen fit to make available. Ghandi is often quoted as saying, “Be the change you want to see in the world” yet those that actually make the effort, the ones that take up figurative arms and go to battle the injustices and closed mindedness of a world too lost in itself and unwilling to seek behavior, are the ones that beaten into submission and end up becoming the biggest detractors, the biggest naysayers, the most fervent decriers of any measure of human decency existing in the world. We are made and conditioned into the cynics we become. We offer an unwavering beacon of light amid the torrential storm, a safe harbor of understanding and compassion and for all the effort to keep out the winds, to remain grounded and unwavering in the face of that chaos, we are battered until the deluge comes flooding in and destroys all that has been built. The irony is that when we succumb and become something angry, dark, tormented, hollow, and unpleasant we’re told that we’re in the wrong. There is no safe haven, no salvation, no redemption, nothing to offer anyone, as we’re all doomed, and this is the machine that we built to accomplish this goal. We persecute those that would seek to make this place better because they keep us from the distractions that keep us so well occupied and ignorant. Ignorance has gone from being a vice to the ultimate virtue and the idea of anything else is seen to be the obscenity.